One example includes Kurt Goldstein's, which he stated, "adherence to a present performance in an inadequate way", another being Milton Rokeach saying the definition was, "[the] inability to change one's set when the objective conditions demand it".
[4] Lewin and Kounin also proposed a theory of cognitive rigidity (also called Lewin-Kounin formulation) based on a Gestalt perspective, using it to explain particular behavior in people with intellectual disability that is inflexible, repetitive, and unchanging.
[9] Mental sets represent a form of rigidity in which an individual behaves or believes in a certain way due to prior experience.
[10] It's a type of cognitive bias that can lead people to make assumptions about how they should solve problems without taking into account all the information available.
[10] Components of high executive functioning, such as the interplay between working memory and inhibition, are essential to effective switching between mental sets for different situations.
It is included in what's called the Broader Autism Phenotype, where a collection of autistic traits still fail to reach the level of ASD.
Those that scored higher in ethnocentrism also showed attributes of rigidity such as persistence of mental sets and more complicated thought processes.